The season of glad tidings and warmed cockles ended rather abruptly last night with the start of Ripper Street (BBC One, Sunday). I have no doubt that London’s Whitechapel in 1889, six months after Jack the Ripper was slashing and gashing, was a pretty squalid place, but even so, Ripper Street was brutal. Not only did it open with a bout of bare-knuckle fighting, but one of the men spitting teeth was Jerome Flynn (formerly of Robson and Jerome fame). Take that with your turkey leftovers.

Just as you came to terms with the career resurrection of a man still on many people’s most-wanted list for crimes against pop music, Ripper Street upped the ante – a slaughtered prostitute had been found and everyone assumed it was Saucy Jack wot done it.

Enter Matthew Macfadyen, a beacon of rationality and good diction in a slashed-up world of cockney sparras and petrified tarts. Macfadyen played Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, a man intent on bringing new-fangled policing methods to the East End. And so the stage was set for television’s latest, and, perhaps inevitable, hybrid: the period police procedural. Welcome to CSI – Victorian London.

I don’t much care for procedurals or the casual butchery that tends to come with them but Ripper Street worked – just about. It quickly established a triangular “bromance” between strait-laced Macfadyen, a rakish American surgeon (Adam Rothenberg) and Flynn, who played a salt-of-the-earth Lahndaner who got punched a lot. As is always the case with procedurals, it takes vivid performances to compensate for the dull grind of all the exposition. Macfadyen has such gravitas these days that he adds weight to any production. But the other two held their own, which makes you wonder what Flynn – bar a similarly brutish role in fantasy series Game of Thrones – has been doing this last decade or so while Robson Green has been Extreme Fishing.

What was tedious, though, were all of the references to the historical moment: the old and new ways of policing, the bright light of the future illuminating the dogmas of the past and so on. When Macfadyen started talking about the new underground railway leading to the new northern suburbs of Finchley and Highgate; and when that was followed by a scene when the cop shop got its first telegraph, it was only left for someone in a back room to suddenly invent the toaster. The point was that pathology and forensics were going to change everything. Message received and understood, and now can we please move on?